Nigel Fletcher

Nigel Fletcher served as Special Adviser on Education and Skills in the Conservative Research Department between 2004 and 2008.

So now we know. It’s going to be a graduate tax. Or maybe it isn’t. Depending on which newspapers you happened to read over the last couple of weeks, the future of higher education funding will either be an additional premium on the income tax of graduates, or a more complex income-linked repayment system.

Some Conservatives were alarmed to see that the coalition had apparently identified a new tax as their favoured solution. In fact, those who watched David Willetts being interviewed the other weekend will have heard him say something rather different. What he actually said was:

"We do have a preference for a way of going forward that involves graduates after they have got into work… we do think that then graduates should make a higher contribution to the benefits of the university education they've received."

This line is one I find rather familiar - and is not exactly new. It has in fact been Conservative policy for five years. On 20th August 2005 the Shadow Education Secretary - one David Cameron - said in an interview with the FT:

"We all know that we want Britain's universities to be the best in the world. That will mean that there ought to be some method of co-payment for people going on to higher education."

When he became Leader that policy was confirmed, and has remained his view ever since.

Nigel Fletcher is Director of the recently formed Opposition Studies Forum. He is a councillor in the London Borough of Greenwich, and a former Special Adviser in the Conservative Research Department. Here he considers how previous Leaders of the Opposition have fared in their dealings with US Presidents.

Amid the Obama-mania of yesterday, the US President’s half-hour meeting with David Cameron was but one engagement in a very busy day. But its significance has certainly been noted in Westminster and Whitehall. Mr Cameron’s staff were at pains last week to play down expectations of such a meeting, correctly pointing out that as an inter-Governmental visit, it would not be usual for Opposition politicians to play a role. Only on State Visits is it customary for the visiting Head of State to meet the Leader of the Opposition and the Liberal Democrat leader (as the latter has reportedly pointed out in frustration).

So the invitation for Mr Cameron to meet President Obama was quite a coup. Even a quick handshake between the two would have been notable, but the White House went out of its way to boost the Conservative leader’s status. Announcing the meeting to the Washington press corps last week, Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough put him in esteemed company:

"The President will have a series of bilaterals, including with Prime Minister Brown, with President Medvedev of the Russian Federation, and with President Hu of the People's Republic of China. He'll also, during that day, have important meetings with the Right Honorable David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, and with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II."

Such a seal of approval from the White House is a prize many previous Leaders of the Opposition have sought over the years, with varying degrees of success. Whilst the fluctuating relationship of the tenants of Downing Street and the White House has been the subject of much psycho- analysis over the years, there is an equally fascinating but largely untold story about the relationship between British opposition leaders and the American President.

Nigel Fletcher is an adviser in the Conservative Research Department
and a Councillor in the London Borough of Greenwich. This article is
adapted from his ongoing research for a doctoral thesis on the role of
the Opposition in Britain.

The Leader of the Opposition and the Conservative Shadow Cabinet sat around the table in their meeting room, posed for a group photograph. With two years to go before a General Election, they faced a former Labour Chancellor who had taken over as Prime Minister from a younger and more charismatic predecessor. After the cancellation of an expected General Election, Labour was set for eventual defeat at the hands of a resurgent Conservative Party and its dynamic leader.

That Leader was Margaret Thatcher, and the Prime Minister, James Callaghan. It was 1977, but the parallels with David Cameron and Gordon Brown today are striking. So on Monday of this week, thirty years on, I watched as Lady Thatcher sat with David Cameron in the Shadow Cabinet Room, where she planned her Government, and where he now plans his.

The event was the launch of an exhibition I have put together in conjunction with the Parliamentary Archives, entitled ‘Government’s Waiting Room.’ It marks the contribution the Shadow Cabinet’s premises have made to recent Parliamentary history, and is drawn from my wider research for a doctoral thesis on the role of the Opposition. If the Shadow Cabinet is a Government-in-waiting, my argument runs, its offices are the most significant waiting-rooms in Britain. They matter because, as Winston Churchill said in reference to the Palace of Westminster, ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.’ Well, that’s my excuse – in truth, having worked in and around the Shadow Cabinet block over the years, its history intrigued me.